Chapter 55

Chapter 55

L ilith was strapping one of her twin blades to her leg when they entered the common room, her face uncovered, mask hanging limply by one clasp at the side of her face.

Her eyes rose to look at Joy, then snapped to Fey and she froze, her body going stiff as a statue. Shock lit across her face. Disbelief. The knife in her hand slipped and fell, clattering to the floor.

" Fey ?" she asked, stunned. "I…" Lilith stumbled back a pace, away from her, struggling to catch her breath. She shook her head frantically from side to side. "I don't understand… you were dead. How… how is this possible? How are you here?"

It was strange to see her sister like this, Fey thought. Lilith was always so unflappable. But now? She looked … terrified. Fragile. It hurt to see Lilith this way, and Fey desperately wished she still had her Blade's mark and could still feel what her sisters were feeling. Wished she'd been here when they'd needed her.

"I'd like to understand that, too," said Joy, stepping away from her, and the accusation in her voice, the pain, laced with just a trace of anger, tore into Fey like a knife.

They might not have believed she killed Willow, she realized, but that didn't mean they trusted her .

"There's a lot to explain," Fey began, but stopped as the alarm outside stopped. Joy gave the door behind them that led out of their quarters a thoughtful glance.

"They must have given up," Joy said. "I guess it was a false alarm after all…"

"We don't have a lot of time," Fey told them. "So much has happened, but you both need to know. I never killed Willow. Dameon did it."

Joy sucked in a breath with a hiss, but Lilith just blinked slowly, still in shock.

"Why?" Joy asked, her voice heavy with pain. "Why would he do that?"

"Because they've been lying to us. Dameon, the Queen, all of them. They've been poisoning us, poisoning Witches around the realm."

Lilith was shaking her head. "Fey, don't?—"

"Joy," Fey said, turning toward her sister. Joy looked at her with blue eyes, so full of pain, so full of hurt. "Joy… do you remember your Awakening? Do you remember being given something to drink, something silver, like an elixir?"

Joy nodded. "Of course," she whispered. "It was part of the ceremony…"

"No," Fey insisted. "No, it wasn't. That was Allium, joy," she continued, and behind her Lilith swore, covering her face in her hands. She looked ready to faint. So did Joy.

"The White Priestesses have been giving Allium to the Witches they worry might become too powerful, Witches who might stand a chance of resisting the Queen. They've been cutting them off from certain elements, making sure no one is stronger than the royal line."

Joy was shaking her head. "No, no, they only give Allium to Blood Witches, to…to…"

It clicked in her mind, and Joy's face hardened, her eyes darkening.

"They give Allium to Blood Witches to cut them off from their power…" she finished. Her hands clenched at her sides.

"And in the right doses, with the right ingredients," Fey continued. "They can cut any Witch off from any of the four elements."

Joy's eyes flared, shock burning away to anger. The Air in the room moved in fast, deadly spirals, coalescing around her.

"What did they take from me?" she asked Fey, her voice hard. The room was a maelstrom, with Joy at its center.

Fey could only shake her head in reply. "I don't know," she told her. "But we can find out… there's an antidote, Joy. That's what we found in the warehouse, that's what Dameon sent us to destroy. They're trying to stop the truth from coming out, trying to keep anyone from finding out what they've been doing and putting a stop to it. And they used us to do it…. Used us to help them cover all of this up, to help them kill anyone who was getting too close to the truth?—"

The alarm shrieked back to life, filling the quiet halls with a blast of high-pitched sound.

"What now?" Lilith snarled, lifting her head from her hands to glare at the door.

"That," Fey said calmly, "would be Alice."

She had been wrong. Lilith could look more shocked. Her jaw dropped open, and her eyes filled with a deeper horror.

"Alice?" she whispered, disbelieving, her face paling even more. "No. No, you can't be telling me that Alice is alive, too. That's… that's not possible."

"She's alive, Lilith," Fey insisted. "And she's here to put a stop to it. She's here to make things right."

Fey didn't say it, not aloud. Couldn't bring herself to say it. But the truth hung in the air between them. Joy and Lilith exchanged a look, realizing what Fey was saying.

She's here to kill the Queen.

That's what it came down to, what this moment was all about.

Joy and Lilith were the Queen's Blades, her personal weapons. They were her justice, her protection. Their entire world revolved around the Crown.

And Alice was here to destroy it. Fey's one chance to keep them safe, to keep all of her sisters safe, was to convince them not to fight for the Queen against their own sister. To convince them to step aside and let Alice do what needed to be done .

Joy looked stunned. She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it.

"Fey…" she whispered, finally, turning those huge loving eyes on her. "I don't… I don't know if …"

"Stop the alarm," Lilith snapped. Joy's head whipped back up to look at her.

Lilith's face was dark, and there was no confusion, no conflict in her stare. Whatever shock she'd been feeling was gone now, and only grim determination remained. She, at least, had made up her mind. " Go , sister. Find a way to stop it. Make them turn off the alarm if you have to. But stop it. Before they find her."

Joy blinked at her. Then, with a deep shuddering breath, she nodded.

"Yes," she answered, face hardening, turning resolute. "We need to stop the alarm."

She moved toward the door but stopped. Turning, she pulled Fey into a bone-crushing hug.

"I love you, sister," she said into Fey's neck. "And I'm so happy you're okay."

And then she was gone, racing down the hallway and into the dark of the palace.

Lilith stared at Fey long and hard enough that Fey began to feel uncomfortable under her sister's dark assessing gaze. She was like this, at times, almost cat-like in the way she stared, waiting for the other person to break first.

"When was the last time you ate?" Lilith asked, finally. She knelt to pick up the blade she'd dropped earlier and set it on the kitchen counter.

Fey's stomach rumbled, as though in answer. Hours, she realized. Nodding, as though she had confirmed something, Lilith turned and started rummaging through the kitchen.

"You must be running on fumes," she said. "You need to eat something. You're no good to us if you fall over in the middle of a fight from hunger, and it feels like we've all got a long night ahead of us."

"Thanks," Fey said, smiling slightly. Lilith had never made her anything to eat before, had never particularly liked caring for others in such a domestic way .

Fey pulled up a chair to the kitchen counter, watching Lilith's back as she pulled bread out of a cupboard and began to assemble a meal.

"So, there's an antidote, huh?" Lilith asked as she worked. "Did you take it?"

She glanced at Fey over her shoulder, and in answer Fey called Fire, just enough to produce a ball of flames in the palm of her hand.

Lilith whistled, turning back to her task. "Impressive," she cooed. The butcher's knife in her hand thumped rhythmically against the cutting board and she cut slices from a large red tomato. She fiddled with something in the drawers, and Fey let out a deep sigh.

It was okay. Everything was going to be okay. Her sisters knew, all of them, and Alice was on her way to end it all. Things would be okay, and then, finally, they could all be together again. A family, like they used to be before all of this started. Before Alice left them.

Lilith finally finished and set a plate down in front of her, nudging it toward her. A very simple meal, Fey thought, but even still, the sandwich made her smile. Tomato, chicken, and lettuce. It wasn't the sort of gesture she expected from Lilith.

"And Alice?" Lilith asked, tilting her head to watch Fey and she took off her mask, setting it aside and plucking the sandwich from the plate. "Did she take the antidote, too?"

"Yeah," Fey answered. "But she wasn't ever given any Allium at her Awakening, so it didn't do anything... But she's the one who figured all of this out; she's the one who's been making the antidotes. She was behind the warehouse we burned."

Lilith nodded, absently. Then she frowned at the sandwich still in Fey's hand.

"Eat," she pressured. "Go on."

Rolling her eyes, Fey took a bite. Satisfied, Lilith turned back around and began to clean up.

"How many people know?" Lilith asked, stuffing the bread back into its container, and sealing it.

Fey shrugged, taking another bite, chewing thoughtfully. The tomatoes tasted off, bitter. Or maybe it was the lettuce? She made a face, looking at the sandwich in her hands before setting the sandwich back down on her plate, her appetite vanishing .

No wonder Lilith never cooked for any of them, before. She couldn't even make a sandwich right.

"I'm not sure," Fey answered, swallowing the bite she'd taken with no small amount of difficulty. Yuck . "Enough that there's no way they can keep it quiet after tonight. And the High Priestesses…"

Her stomach clenched.

Something was wrong.

Lilith put the cutting board in the sink and ran water over it, grabbing the soap and continuing to clean up.

"What about the High Priestesses?" she prompted, but Fey wasn't listening.

Something was very wrong. Her stomach clenched again, more painfully this time.

It took a moment for Fey to understand what was happening, to identify what the powers inside of her were doing. She hadn't called either Earth or Water, but they surged inside her, anyway. There was a hot ball in the pit of her stomach, and her power was coalescing there, swirling around inside her, until the feeling began to lessen and vanish.

Poison , Fey realized, suddenly.

You can't poison a Witch who had control over both Earth and Water. Earth recognized the toxins, pulled them together into one place within the body. And Water, whether commanded or not, healed it. It made the Queen immune to all attempts at poisoning. Made her heirs immune as well.

And now, it did the same for Fey.

But there was no way for Lilith to have known that.

As the poison drained from her system, the painful cramp in her stomach fading, Fey looked long and hard at the sandwich Lilith had made for her.

"Why did you really send Joy away, Lilith?" she asked, her voice low. "Did you figure you had a better chance if you could get me all alone?"

"What are you talking about?" Lilith asked, continuing to wash the dishes in the sink. But her shoulders tensed, almost imperceptibly, and if Fey hadn't known her so well, hadn't spent so many years with her, she might have missed that moment of stiffness.

But she didn't miss it. And seeing Lilith's reaction was all the confirmation she needed. Seeing her reaction was a clue to a mystery Fey hadn't even realized she'd overlooked.

Lilith didn't know she held power over Earth now. Had no reason to suspect poison wouldn't have worked on her.

Lilith had insisted that their pasts didn't matter, that they were Blades first and foremost. Lilith had never shared any stories about her time in the Queen's army… had never even told them she had been in the Queen's army at all, had she?

A memory tugged on Fey's conscious mind, demanding attention. The night that Willow died, the night of the Winter Solstice ball, she remembered what Lilith had said when the Queen's sister had been announced.

She had a daughter, you know.

Fey stared at Lilith's back, at the raven black hair that flowed over her shoulders, at the pale almost bone-white skin. How had she never seen it before? How had they all been so blind?

"Cassandra had a daughter," Fey said, her voice sounding foreign and strange to her own ears. "You told us that, didn't you?"

Lilith froze. Then, slowly and deliberately she set the dish in her hand down in the sink and placed both hands on either side of her on the counter, her head down.

"A daughter the Crown made disappear. A daughter who wasn't Goddess Blessed with all four elements…"

"No," Lilith answered. "She only had one."

And Lilith—the Princess the realm had forgotten—turned and unleashed a wave of Fire.